By P. SAMA RAO, B.A B.L
(Advocate, Bellary)
Among the few painter-poets like Dante Alighieri,
Blake, and the Rossettis, Nicholas Roerich occupies an unique place. He is a
mystic like them all, but with a vision by far wider, deeper, and clearer than
theirs. They are all informed with the catholicity of the saint’s which has
realised that
“Small, great are merely terms we bandy here:
Since to the Spirit’s absoluteness, all
Are alike.”
–R. Browning.
But their dreams of the World. Spirit are not all
alike. To Dante Gabriel Rossetti the World-Spirit is a Blessed Damozel in the
full flush of youthful charm tuning up her lyre from across the brilliantly
stranded depths of heaven, for stimulating the creative urge in Man. To Christina
Rossetti, however, who had more faith in the efficacy of tears of grief than in
tears of joy to clean up dross and imperfection, Life is always a ‘dolotous
Valley’ brooded over by only the darks and the greys. Brightness of joy never
flashed thereon or filtered through. To Dante Alighieri Life was a dark valley
again, and the World-Spirit a Beloved whom he tracked in a search which
crystallized into a cosmic atlas whose lines, contours and paints had been
dipped in Love. To Robert Browning, however, the World-Spirit is a rigid
Principle, neither elastic nor strictly unbending, but adjusting itself to the
ordainment of a yet higher Principle, which had shaped it too. Love,
Friendship, and Protection cannot be separated in his conception. He does not
attribute any human values to the Spirit. It is a Principle, quality void, and
mechanical as it were, which creates because It is urged to by the desire of a
Higher Being. To Blake the World-Spirit is the ‘Poetic Genius’ multi-faced and
multi-functioning in right proportion to the diversity of the created. He
epitomizes creation, and the function and scope of Art in the wonderfully
pregnant lines,
“We like infants descend
In our shadows on earth.”
This World-Spirit–the ‘Poetic Genius’
which–“animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the
names, and adorning them with the properties, of woods, rivers, mountains,
lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could
perceive,” is at once the fount of creation as well as its manifold qualities.
It does not possess any particular disposition towards them. Like God, It has
no superior, and its powers are all infinite and questioned: But to Shelley the
World-Spirit is the ‘great Plastic Stress’
“which wields the world with never wearied Love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it
above.”
–Adonais.
He ascribes to it all the three functions of
creation, preservation, and destruction. In the case of the great and the
immortals, their loveliness never fades with death. They become but “portion of
the loveliness which once (they) made more lovely”. This mad and “Ineffectual
Angel” is therefore nearer the scientific truth than the reasoned Arnolds! But
to Roerich as well as the Hindus, the World-Spirit is the Mother–a Bhagavati, a
Rajarajeshwari –overbrimful of loving
solicitude for the welfare of Her children. In a way this motherly affection is
all-embracive: it is at once the root and the basis of all constructive and progressive
emotions. Thus as Roerich has put it, “To both East and West, the image of the
Great Mother-Womanhood, is the bridge of ultimate unification,” standing as She
does like a pillar of space, summoning up all the forces of the far off
worlds.” He has celebrated Her in his poem, Light:
“Every thing gleams thro’ Thy Light.
In the darkness are shining
Particles of Thy glory.
And in my closed eyes
Dawns Thy wondrous Light
Of the Eternal.”
Art and Literature become then a narration, in
enduring form and sound, of the soul’s experience in Life’s various planes of
existence. They commemorate the soul’s relation with the Super-Soul, its joys
of realisation as well its trepidation at defeat. Like an Abhisarika the human
soul–‘a broken arc’–is in eternal quest of its Beloved–‘The perfect Round.’ This
search is not unilateral: it is collateral, and God the Super-Soul is no less
eager to annex the ‘arcs’ that have broken away from Him. Francis Thompson’s Hound
of Heaven which has influenced Roerich’s To the Hunter Entering the
Forest is the most ecstatic expression of a search which is endless, and is
in a circle.
The why, the wherefore, and the whence of such a
quest for one another is not a little grounded on cosmogony, the science of
creation. All philosophies and sciences start from this source and begin to
stray just as their perceptions and predilections diverge. The Mundakopanishad
lays down:
“This then is Truth. As out the well-lit fire
In myriads dart the glowing sparks, even so,
My gentle youth, from out the Changeless Being
Proceed the diverse souls and therein merge.”
like Whitman and Blake, Roerich is a believer in the transmigration of
souls. As expressed by him in Into the Earth, the divine Essence often
visits the earth, and after its tenure is over returns to its Source, and is
reborn again at His command.
Some of Roerich’s pieces sound like Vedic hymns and
have the same fire in them. His ‘Chalice’ is none other than the ‘Golden Bowl’
of Isavasyopanishad, and the flame that lights up the Bowl as well as
the Universe is verily the wisdom garnered of one’s own honest endeavours to
spot out the Divine. A closer parallel to our Vedic conception of Agni, as
delineated in our works of Art, than Roerich’s mystic portrait in the following
lines is hard to find:
“Flame in Chalice!
Father-fire. Son-fire. Spirit-fire.
Three equal. Three indivisible.
Flame and heat are their heart.
The fire–their eyes.
The whirlwind and the flame–their mouth.
Flame of Divinity-fire.”
Since the worlds have all been created by God out
of His divine Essence, they are the reflexes of His own prototype in heaven.
Selves that people these worlds partake of His Essence too. He is imminent in
them all, and He is the one Architect who could again put His pieces together
to evolve His form, the Saguna-Brahman. The poets, the mystics and the
artists are possessed of His acute sense, and apprehend Him, the One in the
many, breaking through the veils of Illusion which cloak their true being.
Nothing short of Roerich’s perfect realisation could utter these lyrical lines,
“Every morning
He plays on the Vina
And sings his song. We think
Sometimes that he repeats
The song; but the song of the Unknown One
Is always new.”
and,
“Accept!
The source of my words, Thou knowest.
Here are the sins and my achievements!
I am bringing them to Thee.”
with all the fervour of humility and dedication. Man’s knowledge which
thinks it knows is unavailing even against the smallest hurdle that is on the
way to progress. It blinds one’s perception into believing in what is not true.
To a holder of such knowledge illusions multiply themselves like Cadmus’s
teeth. But to the man whose knowledge is humble and unconscious, illusion lifts
itself discovering the Great Reality. This humility is the quality of utter
obedience to, and acceptance of, the Truth that “In all the decisions from
earth.” God “has not gone away.” Or in other words, it is born of the faith
“We do not know
The stones know. Even the trees know.
And they remember.
They are filled with meaning.
Everything is filled with achievement.”
Thus to this Russian poet the muteness of stones
and trees is vocal with the message of the continuity of creation; for the
archeological discoveries of skulls and stones are instinct. The human thought,
aspiration and achievement, on both the material and spiritual plane. They are
the germinal centres too of all further knowledge of life, because “The great
‘Today’ shall be deemed Tomorrow.” They are indices of an existence that was
lived, is lived, and would surely be lived, and, thereby create and stimulate
all Life. This is one sense of the tell-tallish tendency of all historic
remain. Rosrich’s “Sacred Signs” included all tangible realities that truly
remind us of the One Intangible Reality behind ephemeral existence. These are
His “foot-prints in the sands of Time”; though muted and blurred, we yet can
discover and identify them as His if only we have been perfected by love, and
labour which means willing service that expects not return.
The greatest and the most enduring beneficence that
God could ever bestow upon Man is one of Peace. Bliss or Ananda is its
legitimate feeling. The stillness that characterises it is not a deadness but
an equilibrium and a harmony of all the forces in Man. His gratitude for this
gift cannot be better expressed than in MacDonald’s lines,
“In every gladness, Lord, Thou art
The deeper joy behind.”
This joy is infectious: it knows only the giving of
itself away. It makes no difference between the soul and the flesh on any
economic basis. It does not concern itself with disquisition’s whether “Soul
helps flesh more or flesh helps soul”, for to it both are one. It creates Life.
The blissful mind is the real speculum of the Universe. God and His creation
manifest themselves therein in the most ineffable colour, sound and form for
the edification of Man. So Roerich’s Drops is a confession and a
twitching to part with the blissful bounty of God which “in profusion is
pouring through (His) fingers”.
God’s creation is effortless, spontaneous, and
natural. Every bit of it is bathed in His great Love and emanates that love.
Nature is sweet and glowing because its elements freely share in His joy, and
disperse the same with the same abandon among themselves. Thus the “fragrance
of Almond trees” is not their individual quality but a synthesis made up of the
blossoming of the Birdcherry and the Apple-trees. Hence Man must create as
Nature does with the selflessness of God and with freedom. God is Roerich’s
preceptor and guide for Art and Literature. He would simply take His pen:
simply spread His ‘objects as before’; for he can never be more original or
charming or masterly than God. He would therefore be His agent only, and string
His pearls into a necklace He would be garlanded by. There is a repetition,
however, in Life, just as there is in Transmigration of Souls. There is the
change too in Life, its concomitant; for
“the sky is transformed
And altered, the wind. The rays of the sun
Shine otherwise.”
But when the poet or artist has to repeat God’s
designs, it has to be done with the freshness and radiance of Nature. Then his
creation would become a thing of “beauty…..a joy for ever”. Otherwise it would
be a tinsel glittering for the nonce.
Every bit of creation has its own tale to tell: of
its source in the past, its being in the present, and of its becoming in the
future. An artist or a poet is therefore enjoined in inimitable words by
Roerich to tell his “dear tale” as Nature does, “wrapping it with the warmth of
the sun”, stringing it with the “fragrant word”, and with a cheerfulness and
radiance of the spring wind’s. Because of the ego, the self, and the
logic-chopping intellect, Man has lost the real joy, the pre-requisite for
genuine creation. The Primitive, with less of intellect and more of joyous
faith in God and His ways, is nearer to Him and could create more endurable
things of beauty than the civilised. Therefore, Roerich emulates the Primitive
and his methods in both his Art and Poetry.
To this Russian poet and mystic as well as to
Browning, there is nothing like evil in Life. It is overbrimful of only the
good. If there is any evil that is visible to the purblind eye, it is there and
does not poison the good but would emphasize the existence of the good all the
more. Every good is reminiscent of God. So everything is sacred to Roerich
which unfailingly reminds him of God’s hand in it. There is no complex of
either inferiority or superiority among the created. Each object, each thought,
is well in its place, and beauty consists in its being there undisturbed and
functioning what has been ordained for it by God. All forms are divine, and Art
really lies in setting them out in proper phrase and colour, not in their sole
existences but in an ideal relationship of alliance and amity with one another
and amid a sweet democracy of their own. Only the yogic intellect could discern
the comity among them. The human brain, swamped as it is with the unfeeling
intellect, and mind beclouded by ego, are blind to intimations of the Divine
through the apparent and separate existences of His creatures. Even the acute
sense of Tennyson had to confess defeat in the lines addressed to a Little
Flower:
“but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and Man is.”
Man should shed all harmful thought wrapping
himself with only goodness and kindness; cultivate a vision which pierces
opacity; and grow to the stature of the sublime to unravel the threads of Life,
and be really useful. There is no morality, no ethics, no speculation of the
Divine, and no culture, but that which helps our becoming that
“noon-tide majesty to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of one wondrous Whole,”
whereby we emulate in our everyday conduct the “Brotherhood of Man and
Fatherhood of God”. This is the foundation of Roerich’s Banner of Peace piously
signed by more than thirty nations for lasting peace and goodwill among
mankind.
It is not for nothing that Siva loves to tenant the
icy-wilds of the Himalayas–the roof of the world–and Roerich is also there.
Mountain has ever been the symbol of man’s spiritual struggle and attainment.
To Roerich the spiritual struggle is akin to a mountain-climb. As height is
attained, what we call the real and the factual clouden themselves away and
vanish like many an illusion or maya, unveiling to the Sadhaka’s gaze
the ice-clad, the ice-complexioned and the ice-glimmering Reality at the top of
all Life. Nor is the image of the hunter tracking down his prey less attractive
or congenial to the poet’s purpose. In each case not a little of preparation is
necessary. The climber or the hunter ought to know his object. He must be
strengthened with an adamantine will and a resolve to get over the hurdles that
may bar his way. He should have the unshakable faith too that what he aims at
is not a mirage but a tangible Reality, the head and fount of all being. Only
that wisdom which does not betray itself–the wisdom of silence, unshowiness,
and humility–and scare away the quarry, and that wisdom that can surely
identify his object can ever avail him to success. So, an acute circumspection
and a knowledge of the ways and the means are no less enjoined by the poet. The
nearest and the surest path has to be hewed through. Discrimination has to be
marshaled up to that purpose. His poem To the Hunter entering the Forest sets
out the spiritual preparation necessary to attain our End.
Though the child is the closest approximation to
God, there is yet the cross-grain of human imperfection in it. It should not be
allowed to taint its innocence by transgressing into the world of the grown-ups
who are partly human and partly brutes, and in the fierce games they play “they
do not touch one another”. The children should therefore be taught to play in
the “Region of Peace” and to believe in no evil, for the “great One could not
create evil” Roerich’s poem, Children’s Castles, is one of the most
delicate and fascinating pieces in all poetry. Nor should people ascribe any
meaning to quarrel, for that is unhealthy, having been born of “ignorance,
falsity, anger”. The innocence and the faith of a child alone can conquer the
worlds as well as God.
The poetry of Nicholas Roerich does not surprise us
with a ‘fine excess’. It is classically simple and direct; and the little
excess, if any, is that of the charm we always find in the soft twitter of leaf
to fellow leaf or the mellifluous cooing of the mother to her babes–the
ignorant–exhorting them to rest and quiet. Sometimes it assumes the
lightning-flash of wisdom amid the dark clouds of ignorance; sometimes it is
the silence and the trust veritable of the Guru through which divine Light is
surely transmitted. Sometimes his positive message is stressed and conveyed by
a negative suggestion, and an invective. He is not so much a positive preacher
or a prohibiter as a cheerful comrade out to benefit others. He is an
unthwarted believer in the continuous progress of self from darkness to Light,
and of human evolution from wisdom to a greater wisdom, without a set-back or a
lull. He is no traditionalist except in the invoking of, and living up to,
whatever is best that may be found in tradition. It enspelled him only with its
cultural aspect. He would fain improve and engraft better things thereon, as
and when his own spiritual experience or visions of the Divine warranted it. This
change he would effect in all the humility of either St. Francis or Sri
Ramakrishna. He is a prophet too; and his visions of a bright future for
humanity have all the brevity and crispness of our Vedic Incantations. They are
Mantraic in tenor and possess the same glow as our Root-Syllables. He relates
in memorable phrase and ‘singing word’ and enticing parables, his speculations
of the self, the non-self, and the Super-Self on the everyday acts of the human
on the physical plane. The physical body, which is usually condemned as
illusory and reekful of unpleasant matter, is elevated Tagore-wise into a
Temple of God, not in the sensual glorification of D.H. Lawrence, but
spiritually as an aid for God to manifest His glory.
Roerich is a great symbolist both in his paintings
and poetry. In a general sense everything is a symbol of what it is intended to
convey, and is the shortest and the most direct interpretation of it by others.
But Roerich’s symbolism, smacking as it does of the Vedic, the Biblical, and the
pre-historic, is not a little abstruse for people, not quite conversant with
them all. “The Birds of Khomas….Keios….Keyosavi…..Yenno–Guyo Dja” etc. are some
of its examples in his poetry. There is a colour symbolism too in the lines,
“By the red, the courageous;
By the blue, the peace-filled;
By the green, the wise.”
Roerich is not a nature-poet like James Thomson.
His Nature is not a distinct entity, more venerable or delightful than either
Man or the voiceless creation like the rocks. She has no existence apart from
them all: for Life is a great Equation, and as Coleridge stressed,
“We receive what we give
And in our life alone does Nature live.”
So that to Roerich she is as much a flaming thread in Life’s fabric and
an accessory one too, like others, in its soundness. She is not the only wise
spirit of the Universe as Wordsworth found. Therefore Roerich’s delineation of
her is not an exclusive adoration. On the other hand his images of Nature are
part and parcel of his thoughts of the Divine, and are just concrete symbols
thereof and nothing more. There is, however, Shelley’s pantheistic quality
about them.
The poetry of Roerich’s words is none different
from the poetry of his colours. They are of the same quality, primitive, and
suggestive of the Great Beyond. There is an intense lyricism in them all which
at once lifts us out of ourselves and into an other-worldliness. The quality of
the crucible that refines gold out of dross is present throughout them all. As
Mary Siegrist, his translator, observes, his poems have been “made in flames as
Nature makes, and there is a cosmic unfoldment in them”.
I cannot give a truer and a better circumspect of
Roerich’s poetry and its message than in the words of Abt. Vogler,
“All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good,
shall exist;
Nor its resemblance, but itself; no beauty, nor
good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for
the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth
too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in
the sky.
Are music set up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that He heard it once, we shall hear it by
and by.”*
* This article was written a few months before the passing away of the
great poet-Painter.